COLUMBUS, OhioA new form of clean coal technology reached an important milestone recently, with the successful operation of a research-scale combustion system at Ohio State University. The technology is now ready for testing at a larger scale.

For 203 continuous hours, the Ohio State combustion unit produced heat from coal while capturing 99 percent of the carbon dioxide produced in the reaction.

Liang-Shih Fan, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and director of Ohio States Clean Coal Research Laboratory, pioneered the technology called Coal-Direct Chemical Looping (CDCL), which chemically harnesses coals energy and efficiently contains the carbon dioxide produced before it can be released into the atmosphere.

In the simplest sense, combustion is a chemical reaction that consumes oxygen and produces heat, Fan said. Unfortunately, it also produces carbon dioxide, which is difficult to capture and bad for the environment. So we found a way to release the heat without burning. We carefully control the chemical reaction so that the coal never burnsit is consumed chemically, and the carbon dioxide is entirely contained inside the reactor.

Dawei Wang, a research associate and one of the group's team leaders, described the technologys potential benefits. "The commercial-scale CDCL plant could really promote our energy independence. Not only can we use America's natural resources such as Ohio coal, but we can keep our air clean and spur the economy with jobs," he said.

Though other laboratories around the world are trying to develop similar technology to directly convert coal to electricity, Fans lab is unique in the way it processes fossil fuels. The Ohio State group typically studies coal in the two forms that are already commonly available to the power industry: crushed coal feedstock, and coal-derived syngas.

The latter fuel has been successfully studied in a second sub-pilot research-scale unit, through a...

Reducing pollution is fine, but carbon dioxide isn't pollution. It's plant food. Expensive carbon capture and sequestration technology is needed only if you believe the anthropogenic global warming, AGW, hypothesis. There's no proof of AGW. We're supposed to accept this ideology on the basis of the precautionary principle! Where else does the left apply the precautionary principle?

The left doesn’t observe the precautionary principle with respect to quaranteening AIDS patients, in foreign policy and national security affairs, or in fiscal and monetary policy. But we’re supposed to observe the precautionary principle for minor increases in a trace gas, carbon dioxide!

This is the plan! They are going to create and implement these capture requirements due to AGW destroying the earth. Then, when plant life begins to DIE, they are going to say, "See, we were too late!"

This is the plan - then they can instill anything they want, because the idiot young in America will buy this explanation: HOOK, LINE & SINKER!!

5
posted on 02/06/2013 6:40:52 PM PST
by ExTxMarine
(PRAYER: It's the only HOPE for real CHANGE in America!)

While the near infinite energy potential of thorium is largely ignored, we fret about the amount of CO2 that burning of coal releases. I am far more concerned about the health effects of fly ash and the trace radioactivity that we are spreading along with it than I am about CO2, and that is for one simple question:

What is the optimum temperature? Taken over the last several glacial cycles, on average most of Northern Europe and North America would be under hundreds if not thousands of feet of ice. For short periods it has thawed enough to grow food crops.

We also now find, thanks to a very recent project to research Antarctic ice cores that it was warmer 800,000 years ago. Yet, nobody seems very interested in why it was warmer then than now.

Are we warmer than the optimum or cooler? Who gets to decide? I am not interested in much of the frantic climate news until those simple questions are addressed.

I am absolutely stunned that the American public can be duped by this "Carbon dioxide is a harmful gas!" bullsh*!. Every green growing thing on the planet, from microscopic algae to the Giant Sequoias (and everything in between!) use CO2 to "breathe" in the photosynthetic process, giving off pure oxygen in return!!!

Cut down on CO2, and you cut down on the planet's oxygen production.

These lying sphincters should be whipped within an inch of their lives, and then hung. Publicly.

Such a craven breach of the public trust is criminal on its face. But to do so in order to perpetrate a FRAUD, thus creating a cradle-to-grave control mechanism over virtually every facet of the lives of every living human being is abhorrent and vile. It is evil beyond words.

Spend 50 years "dumbing them down" with a State controlled crap education system, and then prey upon their enforced ignorance by feeding them bullsnot and soaking them for every dime you can't otherwise steal. I say they've way more than outlived their usefulness. Time to take out the garbage.

Must of been telepathy the minute I read your synopsis I was thinking the same thing. What a waste of money on a pseudo scientific premise. The only reason it may get pushed (patent patent patent) will be because we have a fascist goverment and there’s money in it for them. Let’s see what happens if this makes a mention during the inaugural. Outside of that what other application does this have ?

It's engineering based on an ideology. From the article: In the simplest sense, combustion is a chemical reaction that consumes oxygen and produces heat, Fan said. Unfortunately, it also produces carbon dioxide, which is difficult to capture and bad for the environment. So we found a way to release the heat without burning."

Not only can we use America's natural resources such as Ohio coal, but we can keep our air clean and spur the economy with jobs," he said.

Their twist on the Broken Window fallacy.

You would think that a scientist would be smarter than that but then I am sure that he is being funded by a government grant to produce this technology.

How is making electricity more expensive by making the generation of the electricity less efficient going to spur the economy with jobs?

Yes you may produce a few construction jobs while you are building your white elephant of a coal plant but you are going to destroy jobs by making energy more expensive.

The best way to grow the economy is to make energy less expensive. You do that by reducing regulatory burdens that are counter productive. You do that by making it easier to build new modern generation plants and oil refineries. You do that by making it easier to license new coal mines nuclear power plants and oil fields.

This nonsense about carbon dioxide and anthropomorphic global warming is junk science and needs to be put in the dustbin of history.

14
posted on 02/06/2013 7:14:45 PM PST
by Pontiac
(The welfare state must fail because it is contrary to human nature and diminishes the human spirit.)

This isn't ideology, this is engineering. It would be worthwhile for you and other freepers who don't bother to read the actual article, to learn to recognize the difference.

I read the press release and what I linked in comment# 1. I wrote in comment# 1: "Expensive carbon capture and sequestration technology is needed only if you believe the anthropogenic global warming, AGW, hypothesis."

Coal-Direct Chemical Looping (CDCL), might be good for reducing real pollution. I don't see a need for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) unless manmade climate change is proven. I'm still waiting for some evidence.

Dolphins, spotted owls, baby seals, and the Dali Lama still exhale this pollutant with every breath they take. Until we find a way to exterminate these polluters, we’ll never be free of the carbon dioxide scourge.

Since the process captures nearly all the carbon dioxide, it exceeds the goals that DOE has set for developing clean energy. New technologies that use fossil fuels should not raise the cost of electricity more than 35 percent, while still capturing more than 90 percent of the resulting carbon dioxide.

Ideology or engineering it doesnt make a difference once you look at the bottom line.

Our economy can not afford a 35% increase in the price of electricity and still compete on the world market.

The Chinese are working very hard to reduce the cost of the energy in their economy. They have built the largest Hydro-electric dam in the world, they building a fleet of modern nuclear power plants and buy up oil leases world wide. They are aggressively expanding their access to cheap energy. We simply can not afford this kind of navel gazing idealistic non-sense that does nothing useful and raises the cost of everything.

19
posted on 02/06/2013 8:48:30 PM PST
by Pontiac
(The welfare state must fail because it is contrary to human nature and diminishes the human spirit.)

I am not talking about an overnight change, I am talking frog in the pot slow boiling. TODAY we are not in danger, but like the social systems which were developed over 60 years ago, in time they begin to take their toll. The LIBS will demand more and more CO2 to be captured - to combat AGW. Their end goal is probably to reach the 200ppm or less to PROVE that AGW is real!

The fools involved in this mess don't care what they have to do to control us - even killing us - so long as they get to be proven right.

30
posted on 02/07/2013 5:35:20 AM PST
by ExTxMarine
(PRAYER: It's the only HOPE for real CHANGE in America!)

Not easy. The ocean will release CO2 at about 300 ppm or higher now because of recent uptake. So the new natural equilibrium for CO2 is safely high. It would be very difficult to get below that.

Your points are valid: there is a group called 350.org that thinks along those lines (reducing CO2 is good). There is also plant death and ice age spiral below a certain amount. But getting to that point now with our added CO2 is basically impossible.

My thoughts too...if they capture the CO2, what then are they doing with it, or proposing to do with it? Maybe a huge greenhouse, creating a rainforest etc? Oh, wait...we already have that...it is our Earth’s ecosystem!

Just do what we have always done...release the CO2 to the Earth’s atmosphere...

Or another thought...a facility, a ‘living’ quarters, for these AGW leftist, zombiefied goonies to capture the CO2 they are breating out, enhancing their CO2 environment until they are overcome by the sheer joy of being deprived of O2 and saving all the rest of us from Global Warming doom!

32
posted on 02/07/2013 6:26:40 AM PST
by GGpaX4DumpedTea
(I am a Tea Party descendant...steeped in the Constitutional Republic given to us by the Founders.)

I am just stunned that conversion losses are 170% of gross generation. Conversion seems like a gold mine of opportunity if just 10% of those losses can be captured back you’ve just increaesd gross generation by over 15%.

Thanks for your great insights. It’s hard to sort through all the muck and get to the truth.

"...has nothing to do with our weather here and cutting CO2 needs to continue."

Our (the relatively few who are informed and aware) ability to shout over these Media-aided-and-abetted Josef Goebbels acolytes, or to re-educate the already dismally, abysmally uninformed and misinformed public, simply doesn't exist.

What is left are the two options of:

1) Lie down and take it up the Brown Snake hole... ...or... 2) Just start tracking these vicious predators wherever they live and eat, and start filling our meat lockers with their nutirent-dense organs. Hearts and livers are a must-have, and the hypothalamus, pituitary glands and adrenal glands would make a lip-smacking fun desert on some rainy afternoon!

Perhaps I'll write a cookbook to be used "After The Big One" (you knew it was coming once O'Bunghole stole the last election!) which shows people how to make tasty, filling dishes using parts harvested from wayward liberals and "Climate Change" liars.

I see that they carefully avoid the subject of comparing the amount of electricity per ton of coal that can be obtained using this process to current technology. They also avoid the topic of what they are going to do with that CO2 so they can save Gaia from the terrible effects.

To me that smacks of furthering ideology, not engineering prowess.

38
posted on 02/07/2013 9:32:24 AM PST
by AFPhys
((Praying for our troops, our citizens, that the Bible and Freedom become basis of the US law again))

While I understand your point, CO2 is a valuable gas that has many possible uses. So there are other reasons for seperating and capturing the gas. One possible use would be to bubble through Algae tanks to produce bio-diesel or feedstocks for butanol production.

“These lying sphincters should be whipped within an inch of their lives, and then hung. Publicly.”
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

No, no, you are doing it all wrong big guy. First you hang them...by their toes of course. THEN you whip them within an inch of their lives. Then you whip them some more. Then you drop them in shark infested waters...or in a hog pen if your name is Henry.

43
posted on 02/07/2013 6:15:25 PM PST
by RipSawyer
(I was born on Earth, what planet is this?)

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